In the current sheet metal manufacturing environment, flat metal parts are produced by individual sheet fabrication machines such as for example punch presses, laser cutters, and/or combinations thereof. For bending, the flat metal pieces are bent by machines such as benders, press brakes and automatic panel bending machines, etc. With the advance of the CNC (Computer Numerical Controlled) technology, all of these individual machines can be programmed to perform the tasks with which the machines are designed for. For example, a punch press could be programmed for punching operations, a cutter may be programmed for cutting operations, whereas a bender could be programmed for bending operations. The program for operating each of these machines is made with particular softwares that are dedicated for the particular types of machines. For example, flat metal parts are produced from turret punch presses and laser cutters, whereas parts that require bending are produced by bending machines that could bend a flat part to a desired shape according to the model for the part formulated by the design engineer.
The designing process of components that are to be manufactured from sheet metal is accomplished in the current manufacturing environment with various CAD (Computer Aided Design) systems. These CAD system may be both 3-dimensional or 2-dimensional, although most of the designs are now made in 3-D environment due to advantages such 3-D CAD system provide to the design engineers.
In a typical manufacturing process, a routing order for the part(s) is generated. The routing order indicates what machines are to be used and in what sequence these machines are to be used for making a particular component part or the component parts. With the routing order, the manufacturing time is also estimated in order to establish a reasonable start time to begin the processing so as to meet the requested final delivery time. Once a particular machine or machines are determined necessary for producing a part, the CNC programmer would either receive a “flat drawing” of the to be produced component part, or the flat drawing is produced from the available 3-D drawing. Thereafter, a program for producing the part using the machine(s) is generated. If a part needs to be bent, then a bending program for a particular bending machine would also be generated.
Currently, there are several problems that are created when a flat drawing is produced. First, to be able to generate a correct flat drawing, the programmer must know exactly the tooling and the material, as well as the material thickness, and the machines that are to be used for fabricating the part, be that part a flat part or a bent part. The dimensions of the flat part are critical, and are even more so if the produced flat part is to be finalized into a bent component that needs to adhere to precise engineering dimensions. Oftentimes, the produced part has dimensions that fall outside of the engineered dimensions. More often, multiple iterations are required to make the flat part conform to the bend allowances that are required by the type of material used, and the machinery that is used to manufacture the component. And if the dimensions of a component are critical, or if the component has multiple bends at different directions, the generation of a correct flat drawing in a conventional manufacturing environment becomes quite difficult, as an accurate flat drawing requires information based on the tooling, the material, and the machine, etc. in-combination. There is also the matter of trying to generate a flat drawing from a multi-dimensional model or drawing, such as a 3-D model or drawing.
Furthermore, in today's manufacturing shops, it is quite often that the required information is stored in different locations. Sometimes the information consists of notes of the programmer and is dependent on the experience of the programer. Once a flat drawing is generated for a manufacturing process, the manufacturing process is “locked” to that flat drawing and therefore does not allow any flexibility during the manufacturing process. This inflexibility limits the capability and capacity of the manufacturer to produce parts that may well be different in short time and in small quantities.
A further problem arises due to engineering changes that may be required during the manufacture process. In a conventional system where a flat drawing has been generated from an input multi-dimensional drawing, any changes would require the modification of the dimensions of the flat drawing, relative to the different equipment or machines that have been selected for manufacturing the part in accordance with the flat drawing. Given that there is very little, if at all any, feedback between the manufacturing engineering drawings and the design engineering drawings, or models, oftentimes there will be one set of drawings on how the part is to be manufactured and another set of drawings on how the part will look like. Needless to say, such double engineering wastes numerous valuable man hours.
Currently, there are some instances where it is possible to process a finished component from an input multidimensional drawing. These instances require that the manufacturing process be made in a dedicated line of machines, such as the Finn-Power SG punch/shear system and EB panel bending system. However, the dedicated manufacturing systems are limited to handling processes in a rigid environment. That is, for such systems, the process is locked to the particular equipment, and alternate methods of manufacturing cannot be used automatically. For example, if one of the dedicated machines such as a punch press were to breakdown, then in order to route the manufacturing process that would have been performed by the broken down punch press to a laser machine that can do the same work, a new flat drawing, as well as a new program for the laser cutter, have to be generated.